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Was .NET All a Mistake?
mikejuk writes "The recent unsettling behavior at Microsoft concerning .NET makes it a good time to re-evaluate what the technology is all about. It may have been good technology, but with the systems guys building Windows preferring to stick with C++, the outcome was inevitable. Because they failed to support its way of doing things, .NET has always been a second-class Windows citizen unable to make direct use of the Windows APIs — especially the latest. .NET started out as Microsoft's best challenge to Java but now you have to ask: what has the excursion into managed code brought the Microsoft programmer, and indeed what good has it done Microsoft? From where we are now, it begins to look very much like an unnecessary forced detour, and Windows programmers are going to be living with the mess for years to come."
Works fine for what it is. It's not meant to build OS's with. It's meant for the applications within, and certain applications at that. Works pretty damn well for that.
Ditto. .NET drove me away from developing windows apps altogether... it killed visual studio for me.
When it first launched, nobody had .NET framework installed, so you were screwed on that end. Then it started shipping with the OS, but it was never up to date it seemed like. The number of times I just wanted to download an app and have it run, only to be foiled by an out of date version of the .NET framework... which was also freaking HUGE!
It was basically in theory the same idea as java, except with even more restrictions, limits, and headaches. On top of all that, it was force-fed down all of our throats by Microsoft for years, and still even up to this date.
In short, it's like java, but a 10x bigger disaster.
Who cares? ALL my customers are on Windows. The tiny fragment of a market that can't run windows software is irrelevant to most people, especially those in the business of making money.
Even the largest of those tiny minorities (Mac users) can run .Net using bootcamp or parallels or some such.
And for the rest, there's Mono, which will run a subset of .Net stuff.
Really, this notion that EVERY program must be able to run on EVERY platform is just ridiculous B.S. It never has been true and never will be true.
And really, anyone that has to "buy new hardware" to run a .Net application has some pretty alien hardware to begin with. XP, Vista, and Win7 run on most things out there, and Win8 will add to the supported processors and form factors.
Your post is a lot of hot smoke and arrogant ignorance. There's a huge ecosystem around .Net, and it's a lucrative framework in which to develop. That's a simple fact that no amount of foot-stamping will erase.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I strongly disagree that .NET in general and C# in particular has all the drawbacks of an interpreted system with none of the benefits. I don't care whether it runs everywhere or not (although that would be nice). What I do care is the intelligent garbage collection that is only possible with this type of architecture. What I do care about is the enormous library available to me for offloading common programming tasks. What I do care about are generics, strong typing and collections. What I do care about is the easy database accessing. What I do care about is the intelligence available in Visual Studio that can work out refactoring for me. What I do care about is getting complex business apps out the door and being able to support the business with ever more complicated requirements. Sure I could do that with C++ but never in the same time frame. C# and the .NET Framework are my big programming lever.
You have a half a point, and that's exactly what Microsoft was counting on when they built .NET. That enough people would think 'cross-platform within the Windows family' was essentially the same thing as cross-platform. Those types would adopt .NET, and the threat of Java would be blunted. While they're at it, they took some good ideas from Java and added some of their own (yes, they are capable of coming up with good ideas), and made a somewhat improved Windows-only platform that has some minor cross-platform benefits (like support for ARM Windows).
And that whole approach kind of flies if you assume the 'business desktop' of today.
But with the popularity of iPads and the like, even the business community is beginning to understand the freedom that real cross-platform code (which today is most apparent in browser-based apps) enables. Nobody that's not locked into Windows desktop software would ever stake their business on that kind of stuff today. As awful as web apps can be (and they're getting less and less awful all the time), the advantage of server-based apps is obvious to anybody that's ever had to support desktop apps. Especially for database centered apps where the data can't live on the desktop and a network connection is required. So even the cross-platform dream of Java has been mostly superseded by web apps.
.NET is a pretty good implementation of a dying paradigm. Won't be the first time. Meanwhile, the original promise of Java begins to shine when you look at the Android dev kit. To write iOS apps, you need a Mac. To write WinPhone apps, you need a Windows PC (arguably a lower hurdle). But you can write Android apps on a Mac, a PC or Linux, and the binaries work on ARM or X86 devices. Pretty neat. Maybe not as nice an implementation as Visual Studio, but again, the benefits of true cross-platform code become more and more obvious the more and more Comptuer != Windows PC.
Still, the whole shebang will eventually become irrelevant next to the coming web-only paradigm (and yes, ChromeOS is a little ahead of the curve on this). Sure, some things will always want to be desktop-native - traditional cross-platform tools will have an advantage there. But the new standard's gonna be the web, and not even Microsoft can stop that.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...